Louis Kaplan

Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image

This article takes Jean-Luc Nancy’s analogy of ‘the photograph itself, as a death mask’ at the conclusion of ‘Masked Imagination’ as its starting point to investigate and extrapolate what his thinking has to offer to contemporary photography theory. In contrast to the indexical approach of Sontag and Bazin, Nancy recasts the photographic image as a mode of exposure (posed in exteriority) to being-in-common. The author situates Nancy’s debt to Maurice Blanchot’s ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’ for thinking the photographic image in terms of ‘absence as presence.’ The author also reviews Nancy’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s use of the death mask as the ground of the image as well as Nancy’s affirmation of photographic alterity, strangeness, and straying in ‘Nous Autres.’ Nancy’s views on photography’s hallucinatory quality are compared with Roland Barthes to underscore his expository approach and the article concludes with some thoughts on the ‘exscription’ of photographic meaning.

Introduction: ‘Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy’

This issue approaches Jean-Luc Nancy as a philosopher whose thinking matters to visual culture and to visual studies. With the publication and translation of such books as The Muses (1996), The Ground of the Image (2005b) and Multiple Arts: The Muses II (2006a), and with a number of recent essays including ‘The Art of Making a World’ (2005, unpublished), ‘The Image: Mimesis & Methexis’ (2007a) and ‘Art Today’ (2007b) which is published for the first time in this issue in English translation, Jean-Luc Nancy has demonstrated his long-standing interest in and writing on art and aesthetics. All in all, Nancy has made the question of the image one of the crucial subjects of his regard. This body of writing is now attracting attention and increasingly informs the work of scholars of visual cultural studies as well as art historians, theorists, artists, filmmakers and curators. A few examples would include the exhibition Common Wealth curated by Jessica Morgan (Tate Modern, London, 2003), Trop curated by Ginette Michaud and Louise Dery (UQAM Gallery, Montreal, 2006) and Claire Denis’ acclaimed film L’Intrus (The Intruder, 2004). In addition, Nancy himself curated his own recent project on Le plaisir au dessin (The Pleasure of Drawing) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon exhibited from October 2007 to January 2008.

The Telephone Paintings: Hanging Up Moholy

Throughout his career as an artist and teacher, the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy explored the relations between art, science and technology. In 1922, in one of the first attempts to utilize telecommunications technology for the production of art, he ordered five enamel paintings from a Berlin sign factory in order to generate art by telephone. The author reviews the theoretical implications of Moholy’s readymade gesture. The paper includes an analysis of both László Moholy-Nagy’s and Lucia Moholy’s biographical accounts of this event.

Mapping Ararat: Augmented Reality, Virtual Tourism, and Grand Island's Jewish Ghosts

MAPPING ARARAT: AN IMAGINARY JEWISH HOMELANDS PROJECT ANIMATES Mordecai Noah’s bold 1825 plan to transform Grand Island, New York, into Ararat, a city of refuge for the Jews. Utilizing digital media technologies such as augmented reality (AR) as well as the construction of an interactive virtual world, this project gives Noah’s Ararat the chance to become the Jewish homeland that its founder had envisioned but never realized. This collaborative digital art and humanities project is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant. Mapping Ararat combines historical research, para-historical speculation, new digital technologies, and artistic creation to image and imagine Mordecai Noah’s vision in and for the twenty-first century. This photographic image taken at the imaginary intersection of Noah Boulevard and Zipporah Philips

Yahweh Rastafari! Matisyahu and the Aporias of Hasidic Reggae Superstardom

The scene opens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City during April 2004, where a happening event in the new Jewish art and cultural scene was in progress. Organized by the former Knitting Factory music impresario Michael Dorf, the Downtown Seder gathered an eclectic set of Jewish luminaries, ranging from Douglas Rushkoff to Daniel Liebeskind to Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Each of them was asked to perform a ritual bit and to celebrate the festive Passover meal that commemorates the night when the Israelites were liberated from the land of Egypt and from slavery. One of the many musical performers that night was the man formerly known as Matthew Miller, now known as Matisyahu. Matisyahu went on stage after dinner, toasting and rapping out his musical combination that crosses Hasidic song (niggun) and Rastafarian reggae and that demonstrates how intertwined these two Nietzschean “slave moralities” are in ideological

Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany@@@Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings

Reading and misreading Moholy from Berlin to the Bauhaus production/reproduction light - medium and message camera vision as modernist metaphor the experience of modernity the Bauhaus books the new vision, language of modernism exile.